RadeonSI Lands Async Video Operations For Improving FFmpeg Performance

The RadeonSI Gallium3D driver used by all modern AMD Radeon graphics hardware has landed support in Mesa 24.3 for async VCE/UVD video operations to enhance the performance with the widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library.

Following the AV1 still picture encoding support for the RadeonSI driver that was just merged, AMD contractor David Rosca has landed another noteworthy merge.

radeonsi/vce,uvd: Support async operations + UVD HEVC features is the latest merge request to hit Mesa 24.3 for the open-source AMD video acceleration improvements. Rosca explained in that merge request:

"Adds support for async operations for improved performance with ffmpeg. Also report HEVC encode features for UVD.

For VCE there is one exception, async operations are disabled with dual instance because it expects using vaSyncSurface only and I don't have the hardware to test and implement it."

Up to now only the VCN 1.0.0 IP had enabled the PIPE_VIDEO_CAP_ENC_SUPPORTS_ASYNC_OPERATION capability. More background on that async video handling in Gallium3D via the 2022 article: Thanks Microsoft: RadeonSI Enables Async VA-API For Faster Video Acceleration.

Mesa 24.3 is shaping up to be quite a feature-packaged quarterly release due out in about one month or so.